Constructing Community: Experiences of Identity, Economic Opportunity, and Institution Building at Boston’s African Meeting House

The African Meeting House in Boston became a center of the city’s free black community during the nineteenth century. Archaeological excavations at this site recovered material from the Meeting House backlot and a neighboring apartment building occupied by black tenants. These artifacts reveal strategies the community used to negotiate a place for themselves, create economic opportunities, and build community institutions. The Meeting House helped foster community success and became a powerful center for African American action on abolition, educational equality, and military integration. The present study argues that the archaeological and historical evidence from the African Meeting House demonstrates the power of the actions of individuals in the black community to counter widespread racial inequality with personal and community success.     

Ceremony and Citizenship: African American Weddings, 1945–60

Following the Second World War, many Americans embraced the white wedding – an event marked by conspicuous consumption, gendered roles and responsibilities, and welcoming of ‘traditions’ such as formal dress, proper vows and post‐ceremony reception. For aspiring, middle‐class and elite African Americans, the wedding served a dual purpose. Through the ceremony, they demonstrated adherence to the ideals of post‐war American citizenship while preserving distinct cultural practices and values. Focusing primarily on the upwardly mobile black community of Indianapolis between 1945 and 1960, this article emphasises the wedding as a site of both personal and public significance. Adoption and enactment of the white wedding reinforced the strength of the black family and declared African Americans’ rightful belonging to the American middle‐class community.     

Capital's Metropolis: Chicago and the Transformation of American Housing Policy

The US economic recovery of the 1990s accelerated amidst privatization, selective devolution and the reinvention of the public sector itself. Simultaneously, mortgage finance and assisted housing policy were recast in terms of market processes, individual responsibility and private home-ownership, even as gentrification enjoyed a dramatic resurgence. The intersection of these seemingly unrelated processes signifies an important transformation of the American inner city. Nowhere are these connections more explicit than in Chicago, where newly devolved and flexible policy infrastructures are built on the ashes of prominent experiments of previous generations. In this paper we use Chicago as a context to explore the linkages between reinvestment, housing finance and the reinvention of assisted housing. We analyse local and federal developments in assisted housing policy and develop a multivariate analysis of mortgage loans in Chicago's neighbourhoods during the 1990s expansion. New constructions of scale in assisted housing, exemplifed by Chicago's Lake Parc Place and the federal HOPE VI programme, constitute a centripetal devolution mediated by the relationship between public policy and local private market forces. National changes in housing finance have altered historical processes of redlining, disinvestment, and gentrification. Mortgage capital, traditionally responsible for the creation or exacerbation of rent gaps, now lubricates the flow of capital into the gentrifying frontier of the inner city. The intensified market discipline of housing policy, based partly on theories incubated in Chicago, suggests a new regime of neighbourhood change in the American inner city.     

"A fine new child": the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic and Harlem's African American communities, 1946-1958

In 1946, the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a small outpatient facility run by volunteers, opened in Central Harlem. Lafargue lasted for almost thirteen years, providing the underserved black Harlemites with what might be later termed community mental health care. This article explores what the clinic meant to the African Americans who created, supported, and made use of its community-based services. While white humanitarianism often played a large role in creating such institutions, this clinic would not have existed without the help and support of both Harlem's black left and the increasingly activist African American church of the "long civil rights era." Not only did St. Philip's Church provide a physical home for the clinic, it also helped to integrate it into black Harlem, creating a patient community. The article concludes with a lengthy examination of these patients' clinical experiences. Relying upon patient case files, the article provides a unique snapshot of the psychologization of postwar American culture. Not only does the author detail the ways in which the largely working class patient community used this facility clinic, he also explores how the patients engaged with modern psychodynamic concepts in forming their own complex understandings of selfhood and mental health.     

Infanticide and infant abandonoment in the new South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1915

The Civil War and Reconstruction and the South's postbellum industrialization produced economic dislocation on a tremendous scale. One product of that economic upheaval was an increasing problem of infanticides and infant abandonments. This case study of Richmond, Virginia, examines patterns of abandonment and neonaticide as documented in records of the city almshouse and the city coroner. It demonstrates that race shaped the options available to women with problem pregnancies in that African American women had access to fewer social welfare unstitutions such as maternity homes. As a result, unmarried black women kept their out-of-wedlock babies more often than did whites, but they also committed infanticide at higher rates than did whites. Moreover, racial trends in infanticides and infant abandonment suggest that Ricomond's white working class experienced economic advancements at the turn of the twentieth century, while the city's black working class continued to live in depression-like conditions throughout the period.     

Charitable collaborations in Bronzeville, 1928-1944: the "Chicago Defender" and the Regal Theater

In the twentieth century, race-based residential and commercial segregation that supported racial oppression and inequality became an elemental characteristic of urban black communities. Conflict-ridden, black-white relationships were common. However, the Chicago Defender Charities, Inc., the entity that sponsors the largest African American parade in the country and that emerged in 1947, embodied a tradition of charitable giving, self-help, and community service initiated in 1921 by Chicago Defender newspaper founder and editor, Robert S. Abbott. The foundation of this charitable tradition matured as a result of an early and sustained collaboration between Chicago’s white-owned Regal Theater and the black-owned Chicago Defender newspaper. Thus, in segregated African American communities, black and white commercial institutions, under certain conditions, were able to find important points of collaboration to uplift the African American communities of which they were a part.     

Forging African American Minds: Black Pragmatism, “intelligent labor,” and a new look at industrial education, 1879–1900

This article examines black thought and black ideas about racial consciousness after Reconstruction in order to rethink the way African American leaders conceived the relationship between work and intellectual achievement in the late nineteenth century. Conventional scholarly accounts of the politics of black knowledge and education – including the still very prevalent paradigm of industrial and classical education – have missed a fascinating transformation of thought among many African American leaders after 1879 who sought to reinvent black identity. At the root of this transformation were shifting ideas about the black worker and a new industrial economy. The leaders who represented the transformation embraced progressive, pragmatist, and very modern approaches to intellectual cultivation – approaches that were more in line with theories of manual training and object-learning than with classical education. In other words, the intellectual rationales for industrial education among black educators were as important as the economic and practical ones. Those rationales were articulated not just by more conservative black voices intent on fitting into a new industrial order, but also by black progressives and radicals who hoped to cultivate black “self-consciousness,” vigorous engagement with the “real world,” and intellectual independence from white norms.     

THE CO-PRODUCTION OF NARRATIVE IN AN ENTREPRENEURIAL CITY: AN ANALYSIS OF CINCINNATI, OHIO, IN TURMOIL

In April 2001 Cincinnati, Ohio, erupted into violence and protracted unrest after the police shooting of an unarmed African‐American named Timothy Thomas. African‐American interest groups in the city subsequently organized an economic boycott of downtown businesses. In response to the demonstration and the boycott, the Cincinnati government issued a marketing campaign entitled ‘We're On the Move!’, intending to give nod to past failures and launch forward movement on their part. In this article I investigate the entirety of these events as narrative moments under the auspices of urban entrepreneurialism to answer the question: How does the local population inform, rather than simply mediate, the narrative administration of an urban entrepreneurial form of governance? I then turn to a response to the campaign by an African‐American newspaper columnist in Cincinnati to underscore a dialogic relationship between an entrepreneurial city and its citizens as it forms the presentation of entrepreneurialism. In turn, this conception allows for a more nuanced version of entrepreneurial governance more generally.     

Globalizing a Race to Publish an Encyclopedia

In 1912, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray published a prospectus for his “Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race throughout the World.” He promised to publish what literary historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., would describe as the “Grail” for black scholars. As Murray planned his encyclopedia in the first decade of the twentieth century, persons of African descent in the United States were killed and assaulted because of their race, and racial identification was as critical an issue as it was also ambiguous. Moreover, despite its ambiguity, or perhaps, because of it, race, in 1912 and since the Naturalization Act of 1790, had everything to do with American citizenship. In Murray’s time, whether a person was identified on the one hand as “white” or “octoroon” versus an identity as “black,” “Negro,” “mulatto,” or “quadroon” influenced whether or not that person could exercise his rights as an American citizen (with her rights barely entering the question). However, race, as Murray understood with its skin color codes shading the meaning of American citizenship, was much more a social construction than it was biological evidence of a person’s hereditary origins. Formulating a strategy in support of black American citizenship, Murray developed a global interpretation of the black American experience from a pragmatically ambiguous cultural practice to compose an identity for himself, his people, and his proposed encyclopedia.     

Crusading in Africa: Religion,Race, and Post-9/11 Intervention in Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun (2003)

Abstract

African American director Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun, a 2003 war ?lm made with US Navy cooperation, imagines the intervention of Navy SEALs in an ethnic cleansing being conducted against Christians by Nigerian Muslims. It is at once an exercise in black diasporic consciousness and an expression of American exceptionalism. The director aimed to raise awareness of contemporary African crises, but the picture is also the closest Hollywood combat cinema came in the immediate post-9/11 years to addressing and endorsing the polarizing discourse and militarism of the Bush administration. The ?lm’s use of reductive religious imagery, its weak box of?ce return, and its generally hostile reception overseas expose its failure as a tool of diplomacy and reveal the waning ability of triumphalist Hollywood cinema to de?ne or explain the ‘War on Terror’.     

Unsettling “Inner City”: Liberal Protestantism and the Postwar Origins of a Keyword in Urban Studies

The term inner city first achieved consistent usage through the writings of liberal Protestants in the USA after World War II. Its genesis was the product of an era when a largely suburban mainline Protestantism was negotiating its relationship to American cities. Liberal Protestants’ missionary brand of urban renewal refocused attention away from the blight and structural obsolescence thought to be responsible for urban decay, and instead brought into focus the cultural pathologies they mapped onto black neighbourhoods. The term inner city arose in this context, providing a rhetorical and ideological tool for articulating the role of the church in the nationwide project of urban renewal. I argue that even as it arose in contexts aiming to entice mainline Protestantism back into the cities it had fled, the term accrued its meaning by generating symbolic and geographic distance between white liberal churches and the black communities they sought to help.     

“Stones run it”: taking back control of organized crime in Chicago, 1940-1975

In the 1960s and 1970s African American “supergangs” emerged in Chicago. Many scholars have touted the “prosocial” goals of these gangs but fail to contextualize them in the larger history of black organized crime. Thus, they have overlooked how gang members sought to reclaim the underground economy in their neighborhoods. Yet even as gangs drove out white organized crime figures, they often lacked the know-how to reorganize the complex informal economy. Inexperienced gang members turned to extreme violence, excessive recruitment programs, and unforgiving extortion schemes to take power over criminal activities. These methods alienated black citizens and exacerbated tensions with law enforcement. In addition, the political shelter enjoyed by the previous generation of black criminals was turned into pervasive pressure to break up street gangs. Black street gangs fulfilled their narrow goal of community control of vice. Their interactions with their neighbors, however, remained contentious.     

Mary McLeod Bethune's Feminism: Black Women as Citizens of the World

This article focuses on the particular moment of the 1945 United Nations charter meeting as a catalyst for a shift in Mary McLeod Bethune's feminist thought. The meeting, where Bethune served as the only African American female delegate, signalled a change in Bethune's thinking about equality for black women, so she used the founding of the United Nations as a platform to promote black women's alliances with other women of colour. Her idea was to reframe black women as citizens of the world, thus putting them in a numerical and ideological majority rather than keeping them in a minority position. Bethune has often been viewed as a reformer of race and gender issues in the early twentieth century, but a focus on her activism has hidden the intellectual contributions that she made to a form of black feminism that emerged out of her work with other clubwomen and through the United Nations in the 1920s through the 1950s. Specifically, this article argues that Bethune's intellectual work created a framework for African American women's feminism that emphasised anti-colonialism and their global alliance with other women of colour throughout the world.     

‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16

This article explores the intersection of race, class and womanhood during the early years of the Cuban Republic. It focuses on the writings of elite women who published in the black press between 1904 and 1916. While legal reforms and the expansion of the educational system facilitated new gender expectations, racial ideologies positioned upper‐class white women as the standard of ideal womanhood. I argue that elite women of African descent employed modernising gender norms in order to counter anti‐black racism and to affirm their identification with upper‐class whites. In particular, they published articles that promoted the dominant values regarding marriage, education and public comportment. They disparaged unmarried unions and the practice of African cultural traditions among the labouring poor. Elite black women's writings drew from the model of the enlightened caretaker also to engage broader debates regarding feminism and black civic unity. Yet their emphasis on ideals that promoted white superiority helped reinforce the anti‐black tenets of Cuban citizenship they hoped to undermine. By analysing elite black women's articles, poetry and letters, the article demonstrates the importance of understanding how women of African descent forged an intellectual trajectory, and thus contributes to the historiography of gendered racial ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.     

‘At intervals I was nearly stunned by the noise he made’: Listening to African American religious sound in the era of Slavery

Sharply differing perceptions, between blacks and whites, as to the role of sound in religious performance challenge us to recover what we can of the aural universe of African American slaves. To whites during the era of slavery, the sounds emitted by African American preachers and their congregations often seemed wildly inappropriate. In particular, the sermons of black preachers sounded like a mere jumble of thoughts, so much intellectual trash. Blacks, however, heard different things in these sermons, communal, interactive sounds, meanings conveyed through the shifting tones and culturally compelling rhythms of the preacher's voice. Rather than proceeding in linear, logical fashion, black sermons grouped loosely and often surprisingly juxtaposed ideas and images around a theme or series of themes, and in this respect were consonant with other forms of black cultural expression.     

Collectanea

This article examines the poetics of poisoning in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. The article traces the depiction of the conjure woman in novels written by African American female novelists in the 1980s, drawing upon the figure’s historical implications in the black canon. Although Naylor’s novel introduces a number of conjure women, this article shifts the focus from the titular protagonist, Mama Day, to the other conjurer, Ruby, who casts a poisonous spell. Ruby’s spell is grounded in African American folklore and exemplifies Naylor’s re-situation of the conjure woman in a postmodern setting.     

The Death of Frank Wilson: Race,Crime, and Punishment in Post-Civil War Pennsylvania

In 1877, Frank Wilson, an African American man, was executed for murdering a white tramp in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This article examines the trial, punishment, and press reporting of the case in the evolving context of race and criminal justice in post-Civil War Pennsylvania. It presents three main findings. First, it documents evidence of racial discrimination and wildly disproportionate rates of African American arrest and imprisonment in Harrisburg and surrounding counties comparable to earlier research focused on the largest northern cities. Second, it shows that views on law enforcement were diverse within both white and black communities and shaped by the exigencies of local and national party politics. Third, it makes the case that African American experiences of law enforcement in northern states are better understood as part of a national criminal justice culture than in distinctively regional terms.     

中国城市社会阶层空间化评价的思路与方法

探索了一种专门适用于中国城市内部社会阶层空间化评价的思路与方法,提出“五等级+八阶层+三视角”的分析框架。主要过程为：①以职业身份为基础划分为八大社会阶层;②基于组织资源、经济资源、文化资源占有情况归入到五大社会经济等级并赋分值;③选取适宜的空间尺度构建城市社会阶层评价区;④提出一种平均社会阶层水平（ASC）、社会阶层区位熵（LQSC）、阶层差异指数（ISC）的计算方法,并综合评价各社会阶层区的平均社会阶层、主导社会阶层、内部阶层差异特征。将该方法应用到广州市的案例研究,结果表明：广州市社会阶层呈现明显的空间集聚与空间分异;不同社会经济等级人士具有各自不同的区位指向;不同评价单元内部的社会阶层差异程度各异,且与平均社会阶层水平趋势相反。该思路可为中国城市内部社会阶层的空间化研究提供一个可供选择的视角。